Classified advertising has been utilized by the print media for many years. In particular, newspapers and magazines utilize this device to generate revenue from individuals or other relatively small sellers who could otherwise not afford to advertise goods and services they wish to sell. Classified advertising has also served buyers in allowing them access to goods or services from these individuals or small sellers. Classified advertising is also used by large volume sellers to reach users who look to such advertising for items such as homes or automobiles. Thus, classified advertising has proven very useful over the years in bringing buyers and sellers together.
Some publications such as newspapers have attempted to augment their printed classified advertising by offering telephonic electronic classified advertising. Electronic classified ads are intended to allow sellers of goods and services the ability to augment their print ad with an audio ad. Electronic classified advertising may solve many needs that are currently unmet by print ads alone. For example, the potential buyer can hear more detail about the product or service being offered than is included in the printed ad. Thus, the buyer is able to hear more detail without having to talk directly to the seller. The electronic ad can be updated frequently to show changes in price or availability of the goods and/or services. Advantages such as these allow the publication to have greater success in selling its classified ads.
Existing electronic classified advertising systems have thus helped publishers to sell their advertising, sellers to sell their goods and services, and buyers to purchase same. However, existing electronic classified advertising systems such as those using voice messaging systems have some limitations which inhibit their usefulness. Some existing systems utilize a standard voice mailbox interface which requires the buyer to call a telephone number each time he wishes to listen to an ad, be it the same ad or a different ad. These systems also play the ad only once and then require the buyer to leave a message for the seller, hang up or transfer to another mailbox. If the buyer wishes to hear other classified ads listed in the classified advertising publication, she must either wait until after the message prompt (either leaving a message or not) and dial a mailbox number to access each of those ads or, in some systems, he must hang up and call again.
One of the limitations of prior art electronic classified systems is their complexity and lack of flexibility. In general these systems are difficult to use. The easier the system is to use the more it will be used. Prior art methods and systems do not permit a user to manipulate a plurality of selected advertisements by advancing or retreating a predetermined period of time within an advertisement during playback thereof, or pausing and automatically resuming playback of an advertisement. Prior art methods and systems also do not permit a user to playback or skip playback of a subset of the plurality of selected advertisements. Finally, prior art methods and systems also do not provide for playback of such advertisements such that the sound quality thereof approximates that of natural speech without having to separately record each advertisement as a single pre-recorded message.